The Playwright's Muse

August Wilson penned his first play after seeing a man shot to death. Horton Foote began writing plays to create parts for himself as an actor. Edward Albee faced commercial pressures to modify his scripts-and resisted. After Wit, Margaret Edson swore off playwriting altogether and decided to keep her day job as a kindergarten teacher, instead. The Playwright's Muse presents never-before-published interviews with some of the greatest names of American drama-all recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize. In these scintillating exchanges with eleven leading dramatists, we learn about their inspirations and begin to grasp how the creative process works in the mind of a writer. We learn how their first plays took shape, how it felt to read their first reviews, and what keeps them writing for theater today. Introductory essays on each playwright's life and work, written by theater artists and scholars with strong professional relationships to their subjects, provide additional insight into the writers' contributions to contemporary theater.

Joan Herrington is Director of Women's Theatre and Associate Professor of Theatre at Western Michigan University. She is author of I Ain't Sorry For Nothin' IDone: August Wilson's Process of Playwriting.

1. Introduction 2. Not Having It All: Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women 3. Interview with Wendy Wasserstein 4. Birth, Baptism and Redemption: August Wilson and the Blues 5. Interview with August Wilson 6. Broadway Boundaries: Neil Simon and Popular Culture 7. Interview with Neil Simon 8. Lessons from our First Frontier 9. Interview with Robert Schenkkan 10. Kushner's Arcades; The borders are full of holes 11. Interview with Tony Kushner 12.A's Last Memory: Contextualizing Albee's Three Tall Women 13. Interview with Edward Albee 14. All's Grace: The Work of Horton Foote 15. Interview with Horton Foote 16. Jonathan Larson rocks Broadway 17. Conversations with Jonathan Larson 18. Paula Vogel's Sites of Resistance 19. Interview with Paula Vogel 20. Margaret Edson: Playwright in Spite of Herself 21. Donald Margulies: From Boy(chick) to Man(sh) Selected Bibliography Contributors